Chapter 4 — The Photographs

They put me in a private room with an emergency-room social worker, who spoke to me gently, and asked me careful questions, and photographed my injuries for the record.

And here is where the story turns, where I stopped being only a victim and became something Wendy and Luca had entirely forgotten I was capable of being.

Because as that social worker documented my injuries, some deep, cold, professional part of me woke up and took over — the part that had spent nine years of my life doing exactly this: building an evidentiary record, one careful item at a time, that would hold up under the most hostile scrutiny imaginable.

I did not know it consciously yet, but I was already, lying on that examination table, beginning to work the case.